I've been slowly converting my CD collection to MP3s (why, I don't quite know; it's not as if I have an iPod). The most annoying factor is the need to be there to change to another disc when it's done encoding everything. However, another hint about the fact that the system will offer to play CD images made me try making and encoding from an image... and it worked.

So, if you want to batch up several CDs, and have several gigs to blow on this quest, you can make disk images of a bunch of CDs, mount them all at once, and drop them into a playlist to be encoded ... then go off to work while your computer crunches sounds. I presently have Audion working on seven CDs, and will let it go all night. I'm not sure if this trick would work with iTunes, as I don't use it.

Now, if only I could convince Disc Copy to make the CD images instead of having to use Toast.

I agree, since ripping often runs at speeds between, say, 3x and 10x. Building an image USUALLY runs at either 1x or 2x speeds (no matter how fast your drive runs; there are sound technical reasons for this but I have no clue what they may be). You waste a LOT of time imaging the CD's, not to mention massive amounts of disk space.

Why do you want to do this? You still have to personally process each CD, but now you are doing it at the Make Disk Image step instead of at the import to MP3 step. So, now you have to do some work every 8 minutes instead of every 10? And then you can batch process all at once.

It seems like you want to save a step, but instead you have just moved the step you want to save to another place in the procedure and added a few extra steps as well.

I too rank this one high in the "Interesting" scale and somewhat low in the "Useful" scale.Wouldn't it be easer to just copy the tracks and let some small script rename the .cdda files with their "real" name? I'm not sure... but I think that copying might be faster than making a disk image. I might be wrong.Besides, if you just rip them directly... that's probably the best solution.All this might make sense if you rip like hundreds of CDs at the same time... but then again I wonder if you would have such enough HD space for it...

I am somewhat confused by the extra work involved in your process, since it nearly duplicates the amount of time and work you'd have done in single encodings. I recommend getting married. My wife will swap CDs for me if I'm nice to her.
Also, use NMp3 to encode. Its a really cool CD ripper/LAME encoder that produces great sounding mp3s. If you're going to all the trouble, get the best quality mp3's you can.

While I'm at work, or asleep, my computer can be grinding away for about five or six hours generating high-quality VBR mp3s of six to eight full CDs. If I stick a cd in the drive and go off to work or bed, it'll finish that one cd, then just sit there uselessly.

I am not saving any steps, but I am making efficient use of my time and of the computer's time. By doing a couple extra steps up front, I am freed from the need to have a physical CD in the computer to encode it. This is vastly accelerating the process of getting my several hundred CDs into the machine; for about the same investment of <i>my</i> time and attention, I get around eight discs encoded instead of maybe three.

I also don't need to enter any information into the machine; since the system thinks these are real CDs, CDDB/freedb gets queried for the full track data - artist/album/track title.

The simple raw-data rip happens in a few minutes; a rip to mp3 takes forever if you're a fan of VBR encoding like I am.

Seems to me you have to extract the audio either as an image or whatever. Why not just stick a cd in and let iTunes do the extraction, conversion and CDDB lookups for you in one shot.
Or you could get autolame which would allow you to extract .wav files to a directory and automagically rip them to .mp3.
I believe source is available and you can change the conversion program to whatever you like to use. Just Google "autolame"